Before the Industrial Revolution, most production as well as most caregiving was performed within the farm household, by family members. You churned your own butter and you cared for your children, your elderly parents and your sick spouse at home.

Thanks to the development of machinery powered by mined or collected energy — be it coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear or renewable energy — most production has long since moved out of the household into mechanized factories. You now buy your factory-produced butter in a store.

At the same time, thanks to the mechanization of agriculture, the number of Americans working on farms has gone from nine out of 10 around 1800 to fewer than two in a hundred today. The surplus labor freed from the agricultural sector by technology-driven productivity growth has been forced to find employment as wage-earners, in industry or services.

What happens to caregiving, when at least one adult must work for wages outside of the home? Ever since a majority of Americans and others in developed nations became dependent on wages for household income, there have been only two options: a breadwinner wage or the socialization of caregiving.

A breadwinner wage is a wage paid a working parent, sufficient to pay for the subsistence costs not only of the parent — traditionally the husband — but also for the children and a parent who stays at home to provide care for the children — traditionally the wife. The breadwinner wage system, which was influential in the unionized sector of the U.S. economy in the mid-20th century, passes on the cost of caring for children and in some cases the elderly to consumers, in the form of higher market prices for goods and services.

The breadwinner wage system, never universal in the U.S., collapsed in the late 20th century, as a result of multiple forces: the triumph of “unisex feminism” over “maternalist feminism”; the declining bargaining power of unions; the entry of wives into the workforce in return for stagnant or declining male working-class wages; and, not least, class- and race-based resentment against policies that allegedly pay the poor to breed instead of work (the widely popular but unacknowledged motivation behind the abolition of welfare as a federal entitlement under Clinton and the Republican Congress of the 1990s).

The alternative to passing on the costs of elder care and child care, in an industrialized society in which most people are wage earners, not family farmers, is to socialize them. While the breadwinner wage system passes the costs of care on to consumers, the welfare state passes those costs of care on to taxpayers.

You can’t have a modern industrial market economy without having some sort of massive welfare state. When production moves out of the household to factories and offices, adult wage earners follow. This creates a crisis in child care and elder care, which can be solved either by paying workers enough to maintain both themselves and their young and old relatives, or by socializing the costs of child care and elder care in one form or another.

Thanks to technology-driven industrialization, the market and the welfare state have absorbed most of the productive work as well as the care-giving work earlier performed by the family in the home. Absent some catastrophe that turns most people on earth back into self-sufficient farmers, producing most of their own goods and caring for their own dependents, this new division of labor among market, state and family is likely to be permanent.

Before the Industrial Revolution, most production as well as most caregiving was performed within the farm household, by family members. You churned your own butter and you cared for your children, your elderly parents and your sick spouse at home.

Thanks to the development of machinery powered by mined or collected energy — be it coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear or renewable energy — most production has long since moved out of the household into mechanized factories. You now buy your factory-produced butter in a store.

At the same time, thanks to the mechanization of agriculture, the number of Americans working on farms has gone from nine out of 10 around 1800 to fewer than two in a hundred today. The surplus labor freed from the agricultural sector by technology-driven productivity growth has been forced to find employment as wage-earners, in industry or services.

What happens to caregiving, when at least one adult must work for wages outside of the home? Ever since a majority of Americans and others in developed nations became dependent on wages for household income, there have been only two options: a breadwinner wage or the socialization of caregiving.

A breadwinner wage is a wage paid a working parent, sufficient to pay for the subsistence costs not only of the parent — traditionally the husband — but also for the children and a parent who stays at home to provide care for the children — traditionally the wife. The breadwinner wage system, which was influential in the unionized sector of the U.S. economy in the mid-20th century, passes on the cost of caring for children and in some cases the elderly to consumers, in the form of higher market prices for goods and services.

The breadwinner wage system, never universal in the U.S., collapsed in the late 20th century, as a result of multiple forces: the triumph of “unisex feminism” over “maternalist feminism”; the declining bargaining power of unions; the entry of wives into the workforce in return for stagnant or declining male working-class wages; and, not least, class- and race-based resentment against policies that allegedly pay the poor to breed instead of work (the widely popular but unacknowledged motivation behind the abolition of welfare as a federal entitlement under Clinton and the Republican Congress of the 1990s).

The alternative to passing on the costs of elder care and child care, in an industrialized society in which most people are wage earners, not family farmers, is to socialize them. While the breadwinner wage system passes the costs of care on to consumers, the welfare state passes those costs of care on to taxpayers.

You can’t have a modern industrial market economy without having some sort of massive welfare state. When production moves out of the household to factories and offices, adult wage earners follow. This creates a crisis in child care and elder care, which can be solved either by paying workers enough to maintain both themselves and their young and old relatives, or by socializing the costs of child care and elder care in one form or another.

Thanks to technology-driven industrialization, the market and the welfare state have absorbed most of the productive work as well as the care-giving work earlier performed by the family in the home. Absent some catastrophe that turns most people on earth back into self-sufficient farmers, producing most of their own goods and caring for their own dependents, this new division of labor among market, state and family is likely to be permanent.